Mexican Actor Toño Mauri Leaves Florida Hospital After Undergoing Double Lung Transplant Due to COVID-19
After eight months in the hospital, Toño Mauri is heading home.
The Mexican actor, 56, has been discharged from the hospital after a harrowing battle with COVID-19 that resulted in a four-month-long coma and a double lung transplant.
Speaking with Despierta América, Mauri said when he first checked into the hospital, he thought he'd be going home the same day.
"I thought I was going to go to the hospital and that that same day I was going home, but what was my surprise, that it was not like that. The virus directly attacked my lungs, it damaged them a lot, so I couldn't breathe anymore," he said, Aldía Dallas reported.
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Mauri said he was told by doctors that his "only hope" was to seek a lung transplant, which he got in December at UF Health Shands Hospital.
The singer arrived at Health Shands in November after suffering complications from COVID-19 for five months.
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He went on mechanical ventilation, had a tracheotomy and was placed on an ECMO machine for 44 days, the hospital's chief of thoracic surgery and surgical director of the lung transplant program Tiago Machuca said in December.
"We worked very hard to get him well enough to qualify as a transplant candidate," said the lung transplant program's medical director Andres Pelaez.
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"He can get his life back," Machuca said at the time. "This procedure was not only meant to save his life, but to ensure its quality."
The hospital said that within 48 hours of the transplant, Mauri was awake and able to breathe on his own for short periods of time for the first time in months.
Mauri told Despierta América that he will be finishing his recovery at home.
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